bookthinks
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A digital scholar is…
Just a quick post as a reminder that my book launch is next Tuesday, 15th at 3pm – it is being streamed live and we'll be hoping for some twitter contributions. We have a prize of a signed (or, even better, unsigned) copy of the book, which we've simplified. Just do a tweet completing the sentence 'A digital scholar is…' and tag it #digitalscholar and I'll pick one winner on the day. I've been doing some Despair.Inc posters for my talk on the day, so thought I'd share this one:
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Views on a book
I have been completing the index for my digital scholarship book and thought I'd share some thoughts on different views of the book. I put the entire text through Wordle to produce the following tag cloud: I then restricted this view to only 50 words: And by way of comparison, here is a draft of the index in Scribd: The Digital Scholar – Index Two questions arise for me: do these representations reveal anything to me, as author? And do any of them provide useful insight or make you as potential reader, interested? The word clouds contain some pretty obvious terms (if digital, open or scholarship weren't in big letters,…
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References are like airport security checks
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/4228752706/ by Mike Licht> This is the penultimate post in my week-long series of reflections on the book writing process (you have been reading them all, right?). I've moaned before that referencing is largely an anachronistic practice which is located in dealing with physical objects. As I said in that post, there are two main reasons that I can see: To properly acknowledge the work of others. The act of referencing provides a clear framework for avoiding plagiarism since it positively encourages students to reference others and thus removes ignorance as an excuse. To allow readers to locate any sources for themselves. This acts as both a check on the author…
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Book analytics
This is the fourth in my musings on the book writing process. When my book comes out it will be freely available online, in HTML (I think). I don't know how the site will be constructed, but it strikes me that as an author this is potentially very interesting. I'm at the Learning Analytics conference at the moment, and Tony has been talking about Google Analytics. I run this on my blog, and it's always interesting, but the type of data it might give a book author is more revealing. On my blog it tells me where people have come from, that most people tend to come from search, and come to one post…
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A tale of two books
Continuing my thoughts on the book writing process, this post is about how the process itself has changed, for me at least, over recent years. I start my book by comparing the process of writing this book with my last one about 6 years ago. Below is a list of some of the tools and resources I used to write this book: Books – via the library but increasingly as ebooks and on Kindle, and one audiobook E-journals – my university library has access to a wide range of databases, but I also made frequent use of others through tools such as Google Scholar and Mendeley Delicious/social bookmarking – as well…
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The book isn’t dead, it just has new friends
So the first of my reflections on completing my digital scholarship book can probably be filed under 'No shit, Sherlock': The book is a good format for some ideas I have suggested that books and articles have had a monopoly as the format for the dissemination of ideas, and new media liberate us from this somewhat. In my case the book has grown out of stuff I've been blogging over the past 4 years or so, but it isn't just a load of blog posts bundled together (whatever you may think). The length and format of a book is a very good means of both exploring ideas in depth and…
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Some thoughts on the book writing process
(The printout of my book) I submitted the manuscript (well the Word files) of my digital scholarship book to the publishers, Bloomsbury Academic, a couple of weeks ago. It should be out in September, with an online OA Creative Commons version as well as the printy touchy feely one. So now is a good time to reflect on the process. In the following posts I'll suggest a number of reflections on the process. Overall it's been rewarding, and a useful exercise, but I couldn't have done it without this blog. Whereas many authors create a blog to accompany a book, I think I have created a book to accompany the…
